Indexing & Page Rank

SEO Orlando – Indexing and RankingWhat does it really mean to be indexed?

Remember the index cards at the library? Similar to a library system, the information gathered by the “spiders and bots” is filed also. Each time the Search Engine visits your site it will compare it to the previous information and update its files. Based on criteria defined by each Search Engine, they will then compare you to the competition in your area and rank you accordingly. The more you update and add to the content of your site, the more often Google will come and take a look.

What determines my position in rankings?

How your site “ranks” is based on very complicated algorithms devised by the Search Engine folks to help them figure out how to deliver the best results to those who use their Search Engine. They take into account hundreds of different measurements – relevant content, keyword density, link popularity, metatags, traffic and a whole lot more. It really is a fine tuned science of determining what the best answer to a “search string” is. After all, that is what we count on them to do for us – deliver the best and most appropriate infomation for each search query.

What is PageRank?

Maybe you have seen that little green bar graph at the top of Google that gives the PageRank of the page that you are on. If you don’t see it, that means that you need to download a Google toolbar so you can see it.
Get it here – http://www.toolbar.google.com

So what does it mean? If you have nothing in the bar graph on your page, it means that you don’t have enough link popularity on the page to generate any PageRank. The linking structure of a website and how it relates to other sites via links reflects the relative importance of pages. If you have a large number of outside sites linking to you it may be an indication that what you have on your page is important and of value, this is why links are important to your web pages. PageRank can range from PR1 to PR10. PageRank also gets passed along through the linking structure. To illustrate this, lets say a site is a PR5 and they have 10 outbound links to other pages. Simple math would divide the PR5 into 10 parts and pass on a share to each link of .5 PR. We suspect that the actual formula is based on 85% of the PR being passed along, so that fraction of a PR point would actually be closer to .4 PR. Now this applies to pages within your own site and how they are arranged and interlinked as well as how you are linked to other sites.

Googles definition for PageRank is:

“We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first. PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.”

How Do I Rank?

Alexa is a good barometer of importance.

Want to see how you’re site ranks relative to every other site out there – try this website http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo – enter any domain name in the “site look up” field on the right and hit “Go” and see how its doing. You will get a number called the “traffic rank” along with lots of other data. It will also show you if you are trending up or down in your rank. You many come up with a number for instance like 6,326,962 – that would mean that in relation to the most popular website on the traffic coming in at #1, you are over 6 million places below the top spot! Usually Google is on top of the internet rankings, followed by Yahoo, YouTube and Facebook.

For a snapshot of the Top 500 sites Alexa has that at http://www.alexa.com/topsites – count yourself lucky if you show up in the first few million! According to Alexa, this number is a “measure of a websites popularity, calculated using a combinations of average daily visitors and pageviews.”

SEO experts in Orlando use terms that are sometimes hard to understand. Hopefully this page will explain some of the search engine optimization language, so you can learn how to improve your website design to incorporate SEO into it.